Here's a brief rundown for the uninitiated: Campbell is a bicoastal designer with over 25 years experience creating sophisticated and modern residential projects in both Los Angeles and New York, but also renovation and restoration of well-known homes including Richard Neutra's Singleton House in Bel Air, a Spanish Mission Revival Remodel for actress Diane Keaton, and the 1936 Spanish Mission Revival Colony Palms Hotel in Palm Spring. In 2006, he founded Studio Tim Campbell to provide design services for high-end residential and commercial projects, along with historical renovations.

Excitingly, he's a released a new book, "Intentional Beauty" published by Pointed Leaf Press, which provides readers with an unprecedented and intimate access to Campbell's world. Filled with earnest examples of his thought process and stunning photography of sunny palatial LA homes, the book certainly earns its title "Intentional Beauty."

Tim Campbell/Hello PR Group

The Rex Lotery’s Parkes Residence original structure was specifically designed to lay low across the landscape, only occasionally raising its head to peek over the site.

Despite his European sophistication, Campbell grew up in the United States as the son of a Southern Baptist preacher, and raised in "the backwoods of West Virginia," as he puts it in his book. But at the age of seven, he experienced the rare clarifying moment of discovering one's talent when he visited a local junk shop in West Virginia and found an old copy of "Architectural Digest" where a Parisian pied-à-terre inspired him to recreate it by wallpapered his bedroom with newspapers to mimic a room overlooking the Seine that was papered with French newspapers.

"I was seeing for the first time the direct impact of intentional beauty set out to evoke an emotional response. I would later come to identify this deliberate feeling as peace," he writes.

From there he began to draw and saved money from his minimum-wage fast-food restaurant job to buy a drafting table. Drawing, architecture, and design in a way became his escape from the prosaic world he occupied and instead transcend into one of consummate beauty. In 1985, Campbell design career began in earnest when he founded CADD Production Resource, a company that provided outsourced design, construction documents, and project management services to the design community. His work denotes a methodicalness when it comes to design, the composition of which consists of a process involving fractals, form and function.

"Every project, regardless of size and scope, starts the same way—with a spark, an inspiration, a feeling, or a moment," he writes, adding, "The spark serves as the trigger for what becomes the fractal of the project, or its essence." Fractals allow Campbell, when designing, to employ a process in which a building, or room, can be boiled down to its "absolute minimal number of elements or shapes." The purpose of this is to allow repetition to turn those elements and shapes into the quiet, restful patterns that are capable of conveying a sense of peace.

Tim Campbell/Pointed Leaf Press/Hello PR Group

In the living room, a pair of custom-made brass cubes, an homage to minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, stands almost invisibly in front of a classic Chesterfield sofa by Soane Britain that has been covered in a midnight-blue leather. Above is a work of an urban Los Angeles scene by German photographer Karin Apollonia Mueller.

Meanwhile, form is largely driven by outside constraints such as a building code, site restraints like topography, and a client's own vision. "These constraints can actually generate an opposing force: Creative tension. For me, that is a powerful tool to use not simply to sculpt a form, but to do so in a way that is natural," he writes. After this, the next piece of the intentional puzzle is thinking about how a home operates -- someone will live there after all, so it should provide to them a sense of relief and peacefulness.

"How do the spaces flow one to the next, how is nature invited in or asked to remain away, where are the “honeymoon moments” in the house, and where is the silence kept? Practical and esoteric, function is the piece that is felt but not seen when executed properly."

The book also details Campbell's love affair with art collecting and includes photos of his own properties, including his "brutally modern" Los Angeles home and more "fanciful" New York one. The LA home features mostly white walls, concrete floors, rusted steel and dark woods, while the New York one was inspired by the flamboyant English writer, raconteur and actor Quentin Crisp’s, whose memoir "An Englishman in New York" served as muse for Campbell. Photos of the interiors show burnt sienna leather chairs and sofas, Prussian blue curtains and accent walls and clay red rugs. In many ways, it appears to blend southwest Americana with a kind of rustic Brutalism. But this is all method to the madness for Campbell, who writes that he decorates with a conscious disregard for conventional rules, instead, allowing an eclectic blend of period and regions to mingle.

Tim Campbell/Hello PR Group

Campbell lives in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, with his partner Steve Machado, and his two dogs, Jack and Boss.

The last part of the book focuses on Campbell's travels to Africa, which began with Cape Town, South Africa. He expected the usual suspects of elephants, lions, and zebras in their natural environment, and expected it would take his breath away. What he did not anticipate, nor could he, he writes, was that it would settle his soul in a way he could never have fathomed. But his travels to the remote villages also inspired activism, and since 2006 Campbell has returned every year to Africa in a humanitarian capacity. He has raised money to help fund a hospital in Maputo, Mozambique, which trains doctors in modern, Western medical care, and helped to fund an organization in Rwanda that provides medical care for the dwindling numbers of gorillas left on the planet, in addition to other projects.

Overall, the book serves as evidence that beauty is not just the admiration of physical objects or reveling in the exclusivity of refined taste. It is more akin to the harmonization of purpose, peace, and appreciation tempered by veneration.